Pat Brownlie began taking classes in oil painting in her teens with a local artist in her home state of Maine. She continued taking art classes in college, though she degreed in English and began working in Information Technology right out of college. She continued painting in oils sporadically as a hobby though it was often difficult to find a place to work where she could also leave an oil painting to dry. As she began to travel, she learned how to use a camera and liked the way she could utilize the camera to create pictures. She started with a Yashica rangefinder and then moved into Nikon SLRs. However, she never had easy access to the darkroom facilities she would need to create the pictures she wanted, and her job didn’t leave her a lot of leisure time.
With the advent of Photoshop for the Windows operating system, she began to read slides into her computer in order to manipulate them with Photoshop and do what she would have liked to do with them in a darkroom. This became a new way of producing artistic pieces that gave her much more freedom to create an image reflecting what she could see in her mind. She thinks of it as a merger or natural outgrowth of her background in both oils and photography. She learned how to combine the freedom of painting the picture she saw in her mind with the manipulation of photographic images to produce a final piece that has elements of both. She calls this process transformational photography since every piece starts with one or more photographs that are transformed into something different from the original.
Pat worked as a volunteer at Quarryhill Botanical Garden (now Sonoma Botanical Garden) in Glen Ellen, CA, taking pictures of the plants in the garden in different seasons for the photographic database maintained by the staff. This gave her a great deal of practice in taking good photographs in all kinds of light and weather and with both closeup and distance shots.
Pat currently uses both a Nikon D7100 and the camera in her Pixel cell phone to capture the photographic images that she uses as the basis for her transformational photography, and she uses Adobe’s Creative Cloud which gives her access to the latest version of Photoshop. She does her own work and also does custom work in conjunction with a client to achieve a piece that combines the aesthetics of both the artist and the client.
The work shown in this web site is available for sale in both print and Metal Print mediums. Use the contact page on this site to open up direct contact with Pat.